Mining it is too late. My brother started a few years back when it was new, and he has a little now. You're not going to get much out of it anymore. As time passes, the the more time it takes to mine a coin.

Well, its a cryptography thing. Everyone around the world is brute forcing for a hash that will "solves" the coin. After that, everyone gets a share of that single coin, which is pretty much NOTHING anymore. And each time a coin has been "solved" it takes more attempts to find the next one. People have data centers working at this stuff, but its pretty much a normal currency now.

Invest, say $1000 when Mt.Gox* is ddos-ed. For some reason everybody decides to SELL SELL SELL if Mt.Gox* webservices have a bit of latency. During this bit of latency, the stock crashes down 70-80% in value, and history tells us that it slowly regains its value in the period of a few days. So, within a week you should have $3500-5000, which is a nice profit.

Some day those idiots will learn, and either the stock exchange doesn't crash upon a ddos-attack, or people will lose faith and the value will not recover. Until then, we might just as well exploit it. It's risky, but if you have money laying around that you could just as well burn, you may want to get into these get-rich-quick schemes, and let the honest hard work (bruteforcing hashes that start with N zeros) be done by others.

* Magic The Gathering Online Exchange - trustworthy stuff, aye!

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Also total volume sold every day on gox is pretty low, so you don't have much liquidity.

But the mining thing is really simple in concept. It is hash cash. There is a hardness setting that determines how many zeros at the end the hash must have. Mining means picking a random nouce, hashing, Does it have the required numbers of zeros? No do it again.

From the math, we know that if the last 16bits need to be zero, then you need on average 65536 hashes (and random nounces) to get a "hit". With 20 bits of hardness its about a million. 30 bits is about a billion. The new ASIC miners are advertising 30 billion hashes a second.

Personally i don't like the idea of work without utility. Also almost all the bitcoins are owned by a few people that started quite early. Personally i wouldn't touch it. Too volatile, too speculative. Invest in platinum or copper instead.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.--Albert Einstein

It's a neat experiment in e-currency, probably the best one to date. It's also pretty much worthless in the big scheme of things, or even the relatively small scheme. Beanie Babies were a sounder investment.

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